What investors are asking about your company, and why IR stopped seeing it

In short

You know what investors ask you. You have much less idea what they ask about you. Most IR teams have a decent picture of the questions that come by email, on a call, in a meeting or from the AGM floor. The ones typed into a chatbot at half past eleven at night get answered by something else, and you never hear about them. To get that signal back, the question needs somewhere to land on a channel you own.

Key facts

• IR sees the questions that come through channels IR owns, such as the inbox, calls, meetings, the AGM and webcast Q&A.

• A question asked in a general AI tool gets answered without you and leaves no record on your side.

• On an open model you do not control which sources the answer uses, or whether it cites yours.

• An assistant on your own site answers from the company information you approved, and you keep the questions asked there.

How did IR know what investors wanted to know?

The channels did that work without anyone noticing.

An analyst called before updating the model. A portfolio manager asked the same thing twice in one week of meetings, and by the third time you knew it belonged in the next presentation. Someone emailed the IR address about how the dividend policy works. The AGM floor told you which part of the strategy had not landed, usually in the least comfortable way possible.

None of that was a system. It happened because every question had to pass through a person to get answered. That is what made the questions visible, and that is what has changed.

What changes when the question goes to a chatbot instead

The question still gets asked. It gets answered too. You are just not in the room for either.

No email in the inbox, no call to log, nobody to follow up with. The investor reads an answer built from whatever the model has on your company, forms a view and moves on. If the answer was thin, you never get to correct it, because you never learn anyone asked.

We have written about the sourcing side of this shift in where do AI answers about a company come from. That piece covers what the investor gets told. This one covers what you stop hearing.

Which questions disappear first

The ones people would rather not put to a person.

Start with the small ones. How the dividend policy works. Whether guidance is on a reported or an organic basis. Which segment a new plant sits in. Plenty of investors will not email IR about that, because emailing a company feels like a big move for a small question. Typing it into a chatbot takes four seconds and costs nothing socially.

Then the awkward ones. Dilution. A covenant. Why a board member left in March. Nobody is watching when you ask a model.

Then the practical ones. An institution in Milan or Frankfurt reads your reporting in English but would rather ask in its own language. A shareholder in Singapore has a question at an hour when nobody at your company is awake.

These groups were always the weakest part of your picture of investor sentiment. The difference now is that they have somewhere else to go, and it answers instantly.

Getting the question back onto your own channel

The question comes back to you when the best answer available is one you host.

In practice, an investor asks in plain language on your IR pages. The answer comes from the company information you approved, with a citation for each point. When the published information does not cover something, it says so plainly. MIRA is a source-grounded IR assistant. What that means, and what it answers from, is set out in what is a source-grounded IR assistant.

You get the visibility because of how it is set up, not from an extra feature. The question was asked on your channel, so it stays with you.

What to do with the questions once you can see them

Treat the list as a to-do list, not a report.

• The IR FAQ. If a dozen people asked a version of the same question this month, that answer belongs on the page, in your own wording.

• Results preparation. Going into a reporting day with the real questions from last quarter beats going in with the ones you happen to remember.

• The wording of the equity story. If one passage keeps prompting the same question, it is not doing its job. Rewriting it is cheaper than answering it fifty more times.

• AGM season. A year of collected questions is better preparation than a brainstorm two weeks out.

None of this needs a project or a new workflow. Someone needs to read the list every other week and act on the top three items.

What the question list does not tell you

It is a record of what was asked on your own channel, and nothing more. Being clear about its limits matters more than any promise.

It does not tell you what investors ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about your company, because nobody outside those companies can see that. It does not track engagement or show who opened which document. It does not tell you who asked a question unless the person chose to say.

One channel, recorded honestly, still answers something IR has been guessing at for the last two years.

The bottom line

Investor questions used to reach IR because every one of them had to go through a person to get answered. That is no longer true, and you do not notice the loss, because a question you never receive does not feel like anything. IR gets the signal back by owning the place where the question is answered, which is also where it gets recorded.

Want to see the questions your own investors are asking? Book a MIRA demo and we will set it up on your published company information, so the first questions you see are real ones.

About the author: Sander van Prooijen is Head of Commercial Strategy at Finvictum, where he leads the European rollout of MIRA. He works with IR teams across Europe on how investors, and more and more AI tools, find and read the equity story. Connect on LinkedIn.